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Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
Civil libertarians are outraged about Total Information Awareness, the government's Orwellian plan to monitor everyone, all the time. But some computer scientists say it might be the only way to save civilization.
Dec 3, 2002 | On Aug. 28, 2001, a 33-year-old Egyptian flight-school student named Mohamed Atta walked into a Kinko's copy shop in Hollywood, Fla., and sat down at a computer with Internet access. He logged on to American Airlines' Web site, punched in a frequent-flyer account number he'd signed up for three days before, and ordered two first-class, one-way e-tickets for a Sept. 11 flight from Boston to Los Angeles. Atta paid for the tickets -- one of which was for Abdulaziz Alomari, a Saudi flight student also living in Florida -- with a Visa card he had recently been issued.
The next day, Hamza Alghamdi, a Saudi man who was also training to become a pilot, went to the same Kinko's. There, he used a Visa debit card to purchase a one-way seat on United Airlines Flight 175, another Sept. 11 flight from Boston to Los Angeles. The day after that, Ahmed Alghamdi, Hamza's brother, used the same debit card to purchase a business-class seat on Flight 175; he might have done it from the Hollywood Kinko's, too. And at around the same time, all across the country, 15 other Arab men, several of them flight students, were also buying seats on California-bound flights leaving on the morning of Sept. 11. Six of the men gave the airlines Atta's home phone number as a principal point of contact. Some of them paid for the seats with the same credit card. A few used identical frequent-flyer numbers.
It's now obvious that there was a method to what the men did that August; had someone been on their trail, their actions would have seemed too synchronized, and the web of connections between them too intricate, to have been dismissed as mere coincidence. Something was up. And if the authorities had enjoyed access, at the time, to the men's lives -- to their credit card logs, their bank records, details of their e-mail and cellphone usage, their travel itineraries, and to every other electronic footprint that people leave in modern society -- the government might have seen in the disparate efforts of 19 men the makings of the plot they were to execute on Sept. 11, 2001. Right?
We could have predicted it. That's the underlying assumption of Total Information Awareness, a new Defense Department program that aims to collect and analyze mountains of personal data -- on foreigners as well as Americans -- in the hope of spotting the sort of "suspicious" behavior that preceded the attacks on New York and Washington. The effort, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is at this point only a vaguely defined research project; officials at the agency have so far declined to fully brief the public on the program and its potential cost, and the few documents made available have stressed that technologists will need several years to achieve many of TIA's goals.
Civil libertarians, not unexpectedly, are already raising a ruckus, their temper brought to a flaring point by the appointment of the man tapped to head the agency: John Poindexter, Ronald Reagan's national security advisor, who was convicted (though, on appeal, acquitted) of lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal. The invasion of privacy threatened by the name "Total Information Awareness" itself is also sure to raise constitutional questions. But computer scientists who specialize in the kinds of technologies necessary to make something like TIA work are intrigued -- even as they express concern. For some, the threat posed by terrorism is so great that the need for a comprehensive response can be equated to the need for the Manhattan Project. It's a comparison meant to convey both how dangerous and how vital to our society constant data collection may be.
"Frankly, I don't see any other way for us to survive as a civilization," says Jeffrey Ullman, a computer scientist at Stanford University and an expert on database theory. "We're heading for a world where any creep with a grudge can build himself a dirty bomb. Al-Qaida has just broken new ground, but you can't see these things as a unique phenomenon. We have to have in place a system that makes it very hard for individuals anywhere to do such things."
But can a system like TIA ever work? There are obvious, huge technical problems, including the sheer amount of data that will have to be analyzed; the difficulties in integrating disparate databases; and the challenge of predicting unprecedented terrorist threats. The whole idea might seem, to a non-expert, like just another unwieldy, expensive, and dangerous bit of American military excess.
Specialists in "data mining" technologies, including people who are critical of the Bush administration, are, however, guardedly hopeful. They worry about many aspects of such a program: the "false positives," the harm to privacy, the possibility that personal information will be misused, the almost inevitable codification of racial and religious profiling. They stress that there should be strict laws governing the collection of data. But most of them think it could work and should at least be researched -- a conclusion that on at least one level is not too surprising: Funding for TIA means more funding for computer scientists.
Public outcry has so far been muted. People already feel constantly monitored, and one may wonder why the FBI shouldn't know you prefer Paul Newman's brand of marinara when your supermarket is well aware that you do. Privacy experts provide an obvious response: Your supermarket can't put you in jail. They also say that it's still early and that once the scope of TIA becomes widely known, there will be widespread agitation over its invasiveness and the consequences of its misuse.
They could be right. But what if TIA does work? What if it can spot the kind of trail the 9/11 hijackers left in their wake -- the test flights, the car rentals, the gym memberships, the flight schools, the public Internet terminals, the driver's licenses with fake addresses, the one-way tickets, all of which are completely innocent when one person does them, but which could raise flags when several people (who know each other) do them at around the same time. Would the public be for a system that helps find terrorists, despite its concerns over civil liberties?
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